Project description
Decoding the oceans of half a billion years ago
Scientists study ancient life to understand Earth, but it is difficult to know how animals lived 500 million years ago. Arthropods are a key group of animals, but their movement and diets in Earth's early oceans remain a mystery. The ERC-funded RECO-ECO project aims to find answers using computer simulations and experiments of water flow around models. The project will test whether the body shapes of fossilised arthropods helped these ancient animals spread around the oceans and impacted how they fed. This work is designed to elucidate the life histories of early arthropods and how they came to dominate on Earth, and create methods to better understand how extinct animals lived by studying their fossils.
Objective
A major goal of palaeontology is having accurate and well-informed reconstructions of the ecology of ancient animals. This is key to our understanding of the broad-scale development of life on Earth and global ecosystems. Arthropods are the most abundant and diverse group of animals throughout Earth’s history, comprising >80% of described species, living across the globe, and displaying a broad range of morphologies that may represent the earliest adaptations to key ecological niches. The RECO-ECO project will test putative ecological adaptations of Earth’s earliest arthropods, clarifying how they dispersed globally and how they moved and fed in these environments >500 million years ago. I will achieve this by refining sophisticated Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations and the novel establishment of flume tank Experimental Fluid Dynamics. RECO-ECO has three Research Objectives: (1) Do morphologies of key extinct arthropods represent adaptations to a pelagic ecology? (2) How do extinct arthropod head shields interact with water and particle flow in feeding? (3) How do arthropod exoskeleton sclerites move and orientate in water and sediment flow regimes? Through answering these questions, I will reveal: (1) whether pelagic ecologies increased the dispersal capability of early arthropods, allowing them to dominate Earth’s oceans; (2) when key feeding ecologies evolved in arthropods and how they shaped ecosystem change; and (3) whether our fossil record palaeoecological interpretations are reliable or impacted by sedimentary flow processes. The need for robust palaeoecological hypothesis-testing is not unique to the arthropod fossil record and so the establishment of reliable and broadly applicable fluid dynamics methods will allow quantitative palaeoecological testing in other animal groups, revolutionising our ability to read ecologies of extinct animals from the fossil record and understand their impacts on ecosystem change throughout Earth’s history.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1211 Geneve
Switzerland
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